Poets In Their Power

Collections From Jorie Graham, John Ash, Ai And Thomas Disch

January 12, 1992|By David Lehman.

Jorie Graham may possess the most flamboyantly distinctive style of any poet of her generation. The lining and spacing in her poems are deliberately irregular, and she makes little effort to comply with other conventions. Some poems break off in the middle of a thought, with a dash instead of a period, and in strategic places she will substitute a blank for a word.

But the surface of a Graham poem is not just flash. The frequent dashes and italics and stammering repetitions are meant to revitalize dead language or to prevent the reader`s complacency; they contribute to the fresh romantic intensity that is the outstanding feature of Graham`s new book, Region of Unlikeness (Ecco, $17.95).

Graham is a poet of the interrupted vision, the story that needs to be told but somehow doesn`t get told, because reality takes place in the interruptions. Her endings avoid the feeling or the look of closure; they seem to hang in the air moodily or menacingly, like the echo of a long last chord in an empty recital hall. Consider ``Fission,`` which ends in the urgency of a spoken command (``don`t move, don`t/wreck the shroud, don`t move -``), as does ``The Hiding Place`` (``no-tell them no-``).

Known for the apparent difficulty of her work, Graham is capable of shocking directness. This is the ultimate question in ``Manifest Destiny``:

``Oh why are you here on this earth, you-you-swarming, swirling,/ carrying valises, standing on line,/ ready to change your name if need be-?``

The best poems in ``Region of Unlikeness`` are those that grapple with history and ``the Phase After History.`` ``Fission`` is set in a movie theater on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, ``The Hiding Place`` in Paris during the upheaval of 1968. ``History`` itself is like a mysterious equation with more than two unknowns, starting with a mythic ``god x`` and ending with Love: ``And if she`s naked now, then what is there to take off/ next?/ and then what will Love do?``

One of Graham`s primary influences is John Ashbery, and it is sign of the vitality and variousness of Ashbery`s influence that he has also had a deep impact on a poet as unlike Graham as the British-born John Ash, who has lived in New York for the last six years. The Burnt Pages (Random House, $19), Ash`s new book, meets the question of poetic influence head on. The poem ``The Ungrateful Citizens`` can be read both as an homage to Ashbery`s ``the Instruction Manual`` and an exhibit meant to illustrate ``the insouciance of influence.``

Ash`s mental traveler reaches a fictitious Naples, and it is paradise, described in loving detail: ``even shy lovers may find corners in which to commune unnoticed/ except by some musician, who wishes only to urge their love forward/ from a tactful distance.`` But the vision cannot last; there comes the revelation that ``all but the richest and most conservative citizens cannot wait to leave my Naples`` and then beggars in rags materialize and declare it to be not Naples at all but ``a place on which the world has turned its back.`` The poem is a parable about the power of the imagination and its limits, which is Ash`s great theme.

Ash`s ``Cigarettes`` meditates on the fact that ``fag`` means homosexual in America and cigarette in England and manages to be both merry and poignant as it solves this word-puzzle: ``A cigarette is like a passion in that it is inhaled deeply/ and seems to fill all the empty spaces of the body,/ until, of course, it burns down, and is put out amid/ the shells of pistachio nuts, or whatever trash/ may be at hand, and the passion may leave traces/ that in time will grow malignant.``

The whimsy in Ash`s work can disguise the seriousness of his subjects and his treatment of them. Consider the end of ``Twentieth Century,`` a prospective elegy, jaunty and nostalgic, for our ``time of marvels``:

``Twentieth century, don`t lie to us./ We love you and you are leaving forever.``

Fate (Houghton Mifflin, $15.95) is the fourth book of poems by Ai, a poet as unusual as her name. An an extremist of the spirit, she writes about the same public-domain personalities that attracted Andy Warhol but with raw passion where Warhol`s technique was sublimely cool. There is no one in contemporary poetry who sounds quite like her, and when she is good, she can be spectacular.

``Fate`` consists primarily of dramatic monologues. An author`s note informs us that the book ``is about eroticism, politics, religion, and show business as tragicomedy, performed by women and men banished to the bare stage of their obsessions.`` The players are such American icons as Lenny Bruce, George Armstrong Custer, Jimmy Hoffa, James Dean and Elvis Presley. Lyndon Johnson tells us he ``was king of comedy,/ before I abdicated.`` Mary Jo Kopechne returns from the dead for a serious chat with the ``fat and jowly``